Administering JIRA Data Center on AWS

Getting started with JIRA Data Center on AWS

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While working with your JIRA Data Center on AWS, you can expand your environment by adding additional nodes, upgrade the existing JIRA instances, or connect to them over SSH.

 

Setting custom DNS name

When deploying JIRA Data Center on AWS, you get a default domain name that points to the Amazon's load balancer. You'll be using it to access JIRA. This domain name depends on the load balancer's name and the AWS region, but in general it looks like this: my-loadbalancer-1234567890.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. You can change it to something more familiar, e.g. jira.atlassian.com, by entering your own domain name in the Existing DNS (optional) parameter in the Quick Start. You'll need a domain name to do this, if you don't have one already, you can register it here.

To set the custom DNS name:

  1. When deploying JIRA with the Quick Start, enter your domain name (FQDN) in the Existing DNS (optional) parameter. It'll be saved in the proxyName parameter in Apache Tomcat, which is a web server used by JIRA. All nodes will be using this domain name.
  2. After the deployment, when you know the address of the Amazon's load balancer, associate it with your domain name. To do this, you'll need to use your DNS service to create a CNAME record where you enter the source and target URLs, creating an alias. See Associating your custom domain name with your load balancer name.

If you have already deployed JIRA, you can still change the parameters that are used by your stack, be it the instance type or the domain name. See Changing resource properties.

Scaling up and down

To change the number of nodes in the cluster:

  1. Set the desired range, so the minimum and maximum number of nodes that can be started in your stack.
    1. In the AWS console, go to Services > CloudFormation, select the stack, and click Update Stack.
    2. Change the Minimum number of cluster nodes and Maximum number of cluster nodes parameters as desired. After this step, the number of nodes (controlled by the Auto Scaling group) will be set to the minimum number.

  2. Change the size of the Auto Scaling group to increase the number of available nodes.
    1. In the AWS console, under Auto Scaling, select Auto Scaling Groups.
    2. Select your Auto Scaling group.
    3. On the Details tab, choose Edit.
    4. For Desired, increase the desired capacity by one. For example, if the current value is 1, type 2.
      The desired capacity must be less than or equal to the maximum size of the group. If your new value for Desired is greater than Max, update Max.
    5. Click Save.

Connecting to your nodes over SSH

Sooner or later you will need to SSH to your JIRA cluster node(s) and file server to perform configuration or maintenance tasks. Note that you must keep your SSH private key file (the PEM file you downloaded from Amazon and specified as the Key Name parameter) in a safe place. This is the key to all the nodes in your instance, and if you lose it you may find yourself "locked out". See Administering JIRA Data Center on AWS for more information.

Note: JiraDataCenter.template deploys all EC2 instances in the Subnets specified by the Internal subnets parameter. If you have specified Internal subnets that are completely unreachable from outside, then you may need to launch an EC2 instance with SSH running and accessible in one of the the External subnets, and use this as a "jump box" to SSH to any instances in your Internal subnets. That is, you SSH first to your "jump box", and from there to any instance deployed in the Internal subnets.

When connecting to your instance over SSH, use ec2-user as the user name, for example:

ssh -i keyfile.pem ec2-user@ec2-xx-xxx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

The ec2-user has sudo access. SSH access is by root is not allowed.

Backing up

We recommend you use the AWS native backup facility, which utilizes snapshots to back up your JIRA Data Center.

Migrating your existing instance into AWS

To migrate an existing instance into AWS:

  1. Migrate its database to PostgreSQL (if not already).
  2. Take a backup of your existing home directory and database.
  3. Copy the backup file to your file server EC2 instance.
  4. Unpack the backup file under /media/atl/jira/shared of your file server.
  5. Restore the PostgreSQL database dump contained in the backup file to your RDS instance with pg_restore.
Last modified on Sep 4, 2017

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